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gwern comments on Morality is Awesome - Less Wrong
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And that you probably haven't watched stuff like Triumph of the Will to understand why Nazi aesthetics and propaganda could be so effective.
Clearly reducing the number of disgusting Untermenschen and increasing the Lebensraum for the master race is awesome if you consider yourself to be one of the latter.
[EDIT] Hmm, feels like a knee-jerk downvote. Maybe I'm missing something.
You totally are. The point of Goetz's comment and mine was not that Hitler was 'awesome' simply because of ordinary in-group/out-group dynamics which apply to like every other leader ever and most of whom are not particularly 'awesome'; the point was that Hitler and the Nazis were unusually 'awesome' in appreciating shock and awe and technocratic superiority and Nazi Science (sneers at unimpressive projects) and geez I even named one of the stellar examples of this, Triumph of the Will, which still remains one of the best examples of the Nazi regime's co-option of scientists and artists and film-makers and philosophers to glorify itself and make it awesome. It's an impressive movie, so impressive that
or
(Oh, how that must burn in the hearts of American feminists: the great female filmmaker is not American, and was a lackey of the Nazis.)
I watched it once, and was very impressed, personally.
Take a moment to savor that. Hitler and Naziism are the ultimate embodiment of evil in the West; modern cinema, invented in America & Europe, are world-around still recognized as one of the quintessentially Western mediums. But here we have a propaganda movie, produced to glorify Hitler and Naziism, 100% glorifying Hitler and Naziism, featuring only Hitler and Naziism, commissioned by Hitler who "served as an unofficial executive producer", etc etc and not only has it not been consigned to the dust-heap of history, it is still watched, admired, and studied by those who are sworn to hate Naziism and anything even slightly like it such as eugenics or criticism of Israel.
Now that is "awesome".
Also, I had a fit of the far view, and it occurred to me that Germany was rather a medium-sized country (I'm so used to continental superpowers, but the world wasn't always like that), and it tried to become a large country, and it took a big alliance of the other major powers to take it down. This is awesome from a sufficient distance.
They had population of 70 million (probably after eating Austria) which was quite a lot at the time, compared to 48 million of Britain and about as much of France. The only more populous independent countries in 1939 were China, USA, the USSR and perhaps Japan.
Meh. Japan does seem like it was higher, according to projections. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=country+populations+1939)
Wikipedia says 73 million in 1940. For Germany it says 69,3 million in 1939 and almost exactly 70 million, but apparently without the annexed populations of Austria and Sudetenland, which I estimate at about 10 million or more.
Edit: not sure whether to include the population of Korea into Japan's statistics, which would make Japan more populous than Germany with certainty. The 73 million figure is without Korea.
That was the German narrative, was it not? Starting from the avowed English-French 'encircling' of Germany - why do you think they were allied in the first place with decrepit Poland?
I don't understand why this was downvoted :( I upvoted it because it's a good point and true. Is it too understanding to Nazis?
Probably. I remember a similar conversation where I posted a Wittgenstein lambasting mindless British nationalism in a WWII context, and VladimirM stepped in to defend said nationalism to much upvotes.
Not very rational to vote down a fact >:( it's not even politics like that one just the things they believed. Is there any post on bias against the poor Nazis, it seems a bad plan if you want human rationality to tar facts about them with the same brush as their evil deeds.
Not really. It falls under standard biases like 'horns effect' (dual of 'halo effect'). Sometimes LWers point out in comments good aspects of the Nazis, like their war on cancer & work on anti-smoking, or animal cruelty laws, but no one's written any sort of comprehensive discussion of this.
The closest I can think of is Yvain's classic post on religion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fm/a_parable_on_obsolete_ideologies/
I'm thinking this evil halo effect regarding Nazis is the most common bias in our civilization, we all know about Godwin ;) but most people who come here probably have a bit of this stuff in their head. If we know this is true maybe it should be fought (or is the benefit from no Jew bashing allowed so huge its OK?)
Minor note: According to an article in Wired recently, the Nazis invented 3D movies.